The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World

by Grandin, Greg

  * * *

  When the killing ended, Mori turned to Cerreño and said, “All is done.” He then threatened to kill the rest of the prisoners if the captain continued to stall in delivering the West Africans to Senegal.

  Mori repeated the threat for the next two days. On the third day, he, Babo, and Atufal approached Cerreño and proposed signing “a paper.” The West Africans had drawn up what in essence was a contract, perhaps in Arabic, whereby Cerreño would take them home and they, in exchange, would return the ship and its cargo once they reached their destination. “Even though they were raw and from Africa,” Cerreño later said, “they knew how to write in their language.” The three men signed the document, and with that, Cerreño testified, the West Africans were “satisfied and appeased.”

  18

  THE STORY OF THE SAN JUAN

  The odds were long that Babo, Mori, and the others would have been able to take the Tryal through the straits or round the treacherous Cape Horn into the Southern Ocean and across the Atlantic to Senegal. But it was not impossible. Just four years earlier, a group of Muslim slaves on a Spanish ship called the San Juan Nepomuceno had managed to complete a voyage nearly as audacious, carrying out perhaps the greatest escape in the history of New World slavery.

  * * *

  Built in Guayaquil, Ecuador, by free and enslaved people of color, the San Juan, which also sailed under the name God’s Blessing, was a fine display of Spanish American ship craft, displacing over a thousand tons of water and mounting thirty cannons. When it set out for Lima from Montevideo at the end of 1800, it carried ninety sailors, including its Basque captain, Anselmo Ollague, and between sixty-five and seventy slaves, mostly “Negros and Moors from Senegal” who had been brought into Montevideo on another ship. The vessel was loaded with more than a quarter of a million pesos’ worth of merchandise, including beeswax, oil, ivory combs, ribbons, glass windows, silver watches, silk handkerchiefs, cashmere wool, English sheets, floral cotton prints, bolts of muslin, “finely worked cowbells,” vials of mercury, leather shoes, silk, hats, gold chains, and silver crosses. Nearly the whole lot, including the Africans, belonged to one man, the ship’s owner, Ignacio Santiago de Rotalde, proprietor of the biggest commercial house in Lima and a member of one of the twenty richest families in Spain.1

  The uprising took place about a week out of port, as the ship was nearing the Cape. The captain and officers were asleep in their bunks for their midday rest and the remainder of the crew members were in the fore of the ship with their guard down. The revolt was led not by one of the West Africans but by a thirty-year-old slave named Antonio, described as a determined and desperate fellow who had once worked as a ship carpenter but had run away from his master. Apparently he had been captured and was included among the other slaves to be sold.

  Having come into possession of the ship’s weapons, the slaves divided into two groups, one moving on the officer’s quarters, the other advancing to the bow. Four officers were killed and the captain was fatally wounded, cut with a saber across the neck and stabbed with a knife in his side. The next day, Antonio, now in charge of the ship, transferred the dying Captain Ollague and twenty-four sailors to a small Spanish ship that the San Juan had come upon. Antonio then ordered the first officer, José de Riti, and the remaining crew to sail to Senegal.

  Riti did what other Europeans in similar situations, including Benito Cerreño four years later, often did: he went one way but told the Africans he was going another. In this case, rather than sailing east, to Africa, Riti tried to make it northeast, to Brazil. The currents, though, in the part of the South Atlantic where the San Juan sailed are difficult to navigate, flowing mostly south and east—that is, away from Brazil. Riti had to both tack against the stream and conceal his true direction from Antonio and the others, probably sailing one way during the day and another at night. Unable to keep his bearings, he drifted deeper and deeper into the middle Atlantic.

  Weeks turned into months. The ship had plenty of food—its holds were stocked with fifteen hundred eggs, five casks of lard, twenty-five barrels of bacon, ham, bread, wheat, beans, lentils, butter, cheese, vegetables, twenty-two quadrupeds (goats? pigs? cows?), and three hundred chickens, as well as delicacies such as figs, chocolate, dried peaches, capers, cloves, cacao, grapes, pears, and wine. But its water supply dwindled. And what was left had become contaminated. Twenty-four of the rebels died of scurvy and dysentery. That no sailors succumbed suggests that the West Africans’ immune systems had been weakened during the Middle Passage that brought them to Montevideo. Along the way, the San Juan crossed paths with two other ships, which the rebels scared off by firing their vessel’s cannons.

  The situation deteriorated, and the ship’s caulker, an older African said to be from Senegal named Daure, began to challenge Antonio’s command. As the voyagers grew desperate, Daure became more suspicious and erratic. Fearing for his life, Riti gave up zigzagging and sailed northeast. The San Juan eventually came on São Nicolau, one of the windward islands of the Cape Verde archipelago, then a Portuguese colony. Riti tricked Antonio into accompanying him and a contingent of Spanish sailors to shore to find water. The ruse led to the rebel leader’s capture and the San Juan’s flight from the island under fire from pounding battery cannons. With Daure now in command, the ship arrived at French-run Saint-Louis, a port city near the mouth of the Senegal River, ten days later. The San Juan entered the harbor flying the Spanish flag and giving a customary eleven-gun salute, which was returned in welcome by a harbor cannon. Led by Daure, the rebels went ashore, delivered the ship to the island’s French governor, and claimed their liberty.2

  The fact alone that the rebels managed to reverse the Middle Passage is extraordinary. According to one study, 493 slave ship revolts took place between 1509 and 1869. The actual number is at least twice that, since many obscure uprisings, like those attempted on the Neptune and Santa Eulalia, aren’t included in the tally. The vast majority were unsuccessful. As many as six thousand Africans might have died in these 493 cases, either killed in the revolts or executed following their suppression. Others committed suicide after their bid failed, as some of the slaves on the Neptune tried to do. Revolts that did lead to freedom tended to take place close to the shores of either Africa or America, where rebels could run the ship aground and escape.3

  Mostly what constituted success was to capture and hold a ship for some time, establishing fleeting floating communities of free men and women until catastrophe struck, until they were recaptured or, adrift in the ocean, they ran out of food and water and slowly died. Some decided not to wait: in 1785, Africans who had taken a Dutch slaver chose death, according to one report, when it became clear they were about to be recaptured. They ignited the ship’s powder magazine, blowing it to timbers and killing between two and five hundred insurgent slaves. The San Juan rebels, though, had crossed the entire Atlantic, surviving a five-month journey that included at least three armed skirmishes.4

  They arrived at the perfect moment. For a very short time, January 1801 to July 1802, Saint-Louis was being run by a former French Catholic priest turned revolutionary, Aymar-Joseph-François Charbonnier, who seemed to be more committed to abolition than either his predecessor or successor. Citizen Charbonnier, apparently acting without consulting his superiors, and perhaps even against their wishes since the San Juan was a Spanish ship and France was allied with Spain, auctioned the ship and its merchandise, used the money to send its crew and passengers back to America, and let the rebel slaves go free. As to the ship, soon after its auction, a British corsair sailing off the island of Gorée burned it to the sea.5

  * * *

  Back in Spanish America, the viceroy of Peru, upon learning of the loss of the San Juan Nepomuceno, used the case to make a suggestion that colonial officials had been making for nearly three centuries: he urged the Crown to prohibit the importation of West African Muslims to the Americas. Slaves who followed the teaching of Mohammed “spread very perverse ideas amon
g their own kind,” he said, meaning Africans in general.

  “And there are so many of them in this realm.”6

  19

  MOHAMMED’S CURSED SECT

  The viceroy didn’t say what he thought those “perverse ideas” were. Rarely did Spanish bureaucrats and Catholic theologians go into details when they discussed the problem of Muslims in America. They didn’t have to. Islam was too familiar, too deeply pressed into the very identity of the Spanish people, to need explaining. Everybody knew what they were talking about when they were talking about Islam. The long, long fight against the religion in Europe gave rise to many of the beliefs that Spaniards took with them when they crossed the ocean to found their empire in America, and it played a fundamental role in shaping the institution, slavery, that made that empire possible.

  * * *

  Spaniards called their war against Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula, starting in 722 and ending in 1492, the reconquista, or reconquest. The word is deceptive for it implies a return to the old and a restoration of what was. The fact is, prior to the arrival of Islam, Iberia was a fractious place of Visigoth wretchedness on the margins of Christendom. Al-Andalus, as Arab and Berber Muslims called the land, was the true restoration, returning a magnificence that had been absent since the time of the Romans. The peninsula, especially under the caliphate of Córdoba, became a center of law, science, architecture, engineering, and literature—even Christians called its gardened, fountained, lit, and learned capital, the city of Córdoba, the world’s “brilliant ornament.” The reconquista created something new entirely: the Catholic kingdoms of Spain and Portugal.

  It is easy to think of the reconquista as a bloody clash of civilizations, the western front of a wider struggle between a besieged Christian Europe and an expansionist Islam. A large part of the God-sanctioned absolutism we associate with medieval Catholicism and Islam was forged during this conflict. Yet 770 years is a long time, throughout which there were sustained periods of peace. Even during the war’s most violent phases, Catholics and Muslims lived among each other, trading goods and establishing refuges of hospitality. Iberia during these eight centuries was a crucible where each of the world’s three major one-God religions—Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism—shaped the others in ways subtle and obvious.

  Anyone who travels today through modern Spain can see evidence of the obvious. It’s there in the cool, clean mosquelike interiors of Catholic churches and of synagogues. It’s present in the food, of course, and in the Spanish language. The farther back in time one goes reading Spanish the more cursive the calligraphy, until by the sixteenth century it is absolutely arabesque, its flourishes and curlicues binding the two bookish cultures together. The syntax and structure of Spanish derives from Latin. But hundreds of common words come from al-Andalus, many used to describe the most primal experiences of what it means to be human and live together in a society: of pleasure and food, law and authority, trade and taxes, and will, fate, and acceptance. As such, they have something to do with this story. That is, they have something to do with slavery.

  Azúcar means sugar in Spanish and comes from the Arabic sukkar. Muslims introduced the sweetener to Europe and had begun to plant it in Spain in the late thirteenth century. The Portuguese and Spaniards took the crop first to the Atlantic islands, including the Azores and Madeira, and then to the plantations of the New World, which needed large numbers of slaves for cutting the cane and grinding the stalks into juice. If the West Africans on the Neptune had made it to the Caribbean, that’s most likely what they would have been put to work doing. The Arabic-derived aduana means customs, while alcabala and almojarifazgo refer to taxes, words that Spaniards used in America to regulate the importation and sale of Africans, among other items. Azotar, to whip, also comes from Arabic and describes a common punishment Catholic and Islamic masters inflicted on slaves. Ahorrar—to accumulate wealth—and ahorrarse—to save one’s self, including by saving enough money to purchase one’s freedom—come from the Arabic words hurr, which signifies free, and harra, which means to liberate or emancipate oneself from servitude, to be free.1

  Military conquests and pirate raids were the chief sources of slaves for Christians and Muslims alike. Yet before being considered true slaves, prisoners were often considered hostages, or rehenes—from the Arabic raha’in, meaning captives used as pledges or security. It was common for Catholics to ransom Arabs or Berbers, either to obtain gold or black slaves or to free Christian ones. Muslims did the same to free Arabs and Berbers taken by Catholics. Mulato, a Spanish word referring to a person of mixed European and African race, is related to the Arabic mulo, or mule, as well as muxālatah, which means a “mixture of things or people of diverse kinds,” often of an illicit or forbidden nature. The obsolete mujalata meant business dealings between Muslims and non-Muslims, including slave trading.2

  Beyond wealth, power, and social standing, Arabic loan words conjure up a fatalism associated with slave societies, feelings of destiny, doom, and luck—resignation, or not, to one’s place in society. Mezquino means “wretched,” a word often used to refer to enslaved peoples. The origin of afán, which in Spanish means “zeal” or “desire,” is more difficult to trace. According to one lexicographer, it might derive from Arabic words signifying grief or worry. It could also mean mystical extinction, a spiritual experience like what Mori, Babo, and their other Muslim companions might have felt as they began their Andean ascent at the beginning of Ramadan. Ojalá and oxalá are popular Spanish and Portuguese expressions. They originate from the Arabic inshallah and mean “if God wills.”3

  * * *

  If centuries of fighting and living together created a shared culture—including a shared culture of slavery—it also hardened divisions, deepened fault lines, and bred fundamentalism. There’s no one instance that can be singled out as a turning point, a moment when tolerance, at least in practice, gave way to absolutism. The Catholic reconquista of Iberia had long been considered a religious war, since it was fought between people of two different faiths. And after years of bloodshed, religious theorists of both the crusade and the jihad elaborated ever more complex theories of “just war” and slavery, sanctioning the captivity of nonbelievers while forbidding the enslavement of the faithful.

  But, importantly, Catholic theologians didn’t argue that the goal of their guerra buena—good war—was the conversion of Muslims. Rather, they legitimated the reconquista as a just retaking of territory rightfully Christian (since the Visigoths had accepted Christ before the Arabs arrived).

  The turn to empire was different. In 1492, the reconquest ended and the conquest began. In January, Catholic soldiers drove Muslims out of Granada, Europe’s last Islamic stronghold. In April, Christopher Columbus sailed to America, shortly followed by ships full of warriors who imagined themselves extending a fight that had begun in Europe. “With the completion of the conquest of the Moors, which lasted more than eight hundred years,” wrote one chronicler in 1552, “the conquest of the Indians began.”*

  Catholic theologians, however, couldn’t justify waging war on Native Americans the same way they justified doing so on Muslims in Iberia, because Spain—or Portugal, in the case of Brazil—couldn’t invoke a historical claim to the land. And the fact that Native Americans, unlike Muslims, had never “known” Christ and therefore had never had the opportunity to reject him took away another pretext to subjugate them. For Spain, these facts posed, as one historian writes, a “legal and moral problem of enormous proportions,” for other European empires were challenging Iberia’s exclusive dominion over the Americas (“I wish someone would show me the clause in Adam’s will that disinherits me,” the Catholic king of France reportedly said when he heard that the pope had given the New World to the Spaniards and Portuguese).4

  Spain began to advance a series of religious arguments to make its case, the fine points of which were dense but the thrust of which was clear: its monopoly right to America was defended as a spiritual mission to save
Native American souls. In order for the justification to work, America had to be kept pure. The Inquisition worked to purge native heresies (including those practices that reminded Spaniards of Muslim rites) while royal officials banned Jews, Jewish converts to Christianity, Muslims, and Muslim converts (who numbered as many as 400,000 people in 1609, almost 5 percent of Spain’s total population) from settling in the Americas.5

  One of the first royal prohibitions of this kind was issued as early as 1501, less than a decade after Columbus set foot on Hispaniola. The Crown instructed its new governor of the Americas to carry out the “conversion of the Indians to our holy Catholic faith” with “great care”:

  If you find persons suspect in matters of the faith present during the said conversion, it could create an impediment. Do not give consent or allow Muslims or Jews, heretics, anyone reconciled by the Inquisition, or persons newly converted to our Faith to pass, unless they are black slaves.6

  Unless they are black slaves. There lay the problem, for slavery was the back door through which Islam came to America. Of the more than 123,000 slaves brought to the Americas between 1501 and 1575, over 100,000 were from the area surrounding the Senegal and Gambia Rivers. A majority were Wolof, Fulani, Walo, Mandinkas, or other groups found in West Africa. Which meant they included Muslims.

  * * *

  Brought by Arab and Berber merchants and clerics, Islam had spread among the people below the Sahara hundreds of years before the first slave ship sailed to America. It created a strange kind of continuity, for even as Iberian Catholics were purifying Europe of Islam, they began sailing to West Africa and finding “Mohammed’s cursed sect” spread far and wide among its black-skinned peoples. “Jalofofs, Fulos, and Mandingas,” in particular, wrote a Spanish priest in the late 1500s, were “infected with the wicked fungus of Mohammed” and “professed the false doctrine of the Antichrist.”